


cards on the table

by VegaOfTheLyre



Category: X-Men (comics)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-09
Updated: 2012-06-09
Packaged: 2017-11-07 08:32:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,198
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/428993
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VegaOfTheLyre/pseuds/VegaOfTheLyre
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>‘You could turn a girl’s head, watching her that way.’ Remy and Rogue, noir-style.</p>
            </blockquote>





	cards on the table

The club Etienne told him about is no more than a shady basement dive, the air thick with smoke-haze, dim light made dimmer by the sunglasses Rémy will not take off in mixed company. He is leaning against the bar, drumming on the countertop idly, a perfect portrait of careless ease; behind his glasses he is busy casing the rest of the room. The standard recipe of drunks and layabouts cut with several ladies of dubious provenance and peppered with one or two whose deliberately-unstudied gregariousness warring with their wary eyes give away the fact that they were raised to the game as he was. He grins to himself, private and small. Couldn’t be cozier.

One woman catches his eye, though he couldn’t tell you why, at first; her face is canted away from him, and she is in quiet conversation with a tired-looking man in a booth at the back of the club. He fixes on her as she slides a folder across the table towards her companion, gloved palm flat: the slim white scarf knotted at her throat, the coiled strength in her posture. It is a warm, sticky night, and no one in this sweltering cavern of a club would be wearing gloves if they didn’t have to. A fellow player in another game entirely.

The bartender comes back with his bourbon. He nods to Rémy pleasantly, says, ‘And what’s your name, friend?’

Rémy clears his throat. ‘LeBeau.’ The bartender’s eyebrows lift in understanding, and he tips his head slightly in the direction of the door to what Rémy knows is the storeroom. Knows, because he just slipped a small but significant package of stolen freight into one of the freezers before coming around front to the bar.

‘Wait here,’ he says.

Rémy nods, sliding his glass of bourbon closer to his chest. One last job for Etienne, he tells himself as he cradles his drink without tasting it. One last delivery and then he will be free of the Guild’s hooks and on his way. Starting over. A neat trick, if he can pull it off.

‘Hello, there, sugar,’ someone says beside him. Rémy straightens to find the woman sitting on the stool next to him, leaning sideways against the bar as she draws shapes in spilled wine on the scarred wood with her fingertip. She is drawn close to him but her eyes are cold, dressed in tight and shining green silk but covered with a neatly tailored blazer from neck to gloved wrist, and despite the languid curve of her spine her body is stiff and still enough to be suspicious. ‘New in town?’

He smiles. ‘How’d you guess, chère?’ Rémy draws the syllables out sticky and warm, hoping to disarm. She looks unmoved, but then again, her own accent sounds like just a few streets over from home; he silently damns the sunglasses, that he cannot turn his charm on full-force.

‘I think I’d remember someone as interested in me as you seem to be,’ she says. She cups her cheek in her hand, tilting her face up to his. ‘You could turn a girl’s head, watching her that way.’

He reaches up to brush away a curl from her face.‘I don’t think I’d forget you either,’ he says, teasing a lock of white around one finger. ‘You’re an eye-catching specimen, you know that?’

She jerks away from his touch; that, or the word specimen. Rémy holds his hand away from her face, pacifying and deliberate, tips his head and smiles. She doesn’t have the sort of face a man would forget, even without the distinctive white slash of hair that frames her face and drops over her eye. He wonders idly which she doesn’t dye it away. He’s glad she doesn’t.

She opens her mouth to say something, but before she can the bartender comes in from the back room, nodding. ‘Looks good, LeBeau,’ he says, holding out a hand for Rémy to shake. ‘Pass on my thanks to Jean-Luc, will you?’

_Dieu soit loué._ Rémy downs his bourbon recklessly, clasps the man’s hand as he stands. ‘I won’t, but I’m sure he’ll appreciate the thought.’

He claps his glass down on the bar and, with a brief smile at the bartender, makes his way for the door. He feels her gaze prickle at the back of his neck but keeps walking; he is listening, though, and so he hears it when his new friend slips to her feet as well, coming forward to catch at the sleeve of his coat. He turns back, and she sidles closer. ‘I thought we were getting to know one another,’ she says. Both guileless and calculating. She doesn’t want to let him go yet, and he wonders very much why not. 

‘No reason we can’t do move this party to a different dance floor,’ Rémy says innocently. ‘You coming?’

Her lashes lift and lower as her eyes flick over him, and after a moment she takes his offered arm without another word and follows him into the night.

Outside it is blessedly cool. Rémy lifts his face to the sky, inhaling deep, mentally bracing his shoulders for whatever will come. The woman on his arm rakes her hair away from her face, hair that looks black and pale blue under the moonlight and the buzzing neon of a nearby sign, and pulls closer to him.

She breathes in. He is not the only one doing some bracing. ‘Do you have friends in New York yet, LeBeau?’

Rémy peers down at her. ‘Why,’ he says, ‘you offering?’

‘Something like that.’ Glancing over her shoulder, she slips her arm out of his and tugs at his elbow to pull him into a dark side alley. ‘I have friends too, you see. Friends who tell me things. Things like when interesting new people show up in town.’

‘Why do I get the feeling this isn’t going to go well for me?’ Rémy says, more to himself than anything else, but he lets her manhandle him; enjoys it, even, as she takes him into the shadows.

‘Friends who notice things like tall dark strangers with glowing red eyes.’ She presses herself close to him, pushing him against the bricks until they scrape into his back through his coat. ‘Why don’t you show me what you’re hiding behind those shades?’

‘It’s not usually a sight people like to see down a dark alley,’ Rémy says.

‘Cards on the table,’ she says. ‘One freak to another.’ He is so focused on her mouth, hovering just over his, that he doesn’t notice her stripping off her glove until she reaches for his face. His eyes widen, but she ghosts her fingertips over his stubbled jaw without touching and says, ‘May I?’

Rémy looks into her face and, suspecting he’s about to make a monumental mistake but also suspecting he would follow her blindfolded and handcuffed into battle, nods.

She touches his cheek and the world goes black.

* * *

Rémy wakes up with a monster of a hangover and a fuzzy blank hole in his mind. ‘Hein—’

He puts a hand to his head. His sunglasses are gone. The last thing he remembers is the alley and that woman’s touch, but now he is stripped of his long duster and stretched out on some motheaten couch in a dark room he doesn’t know, pain rattling away in his skull.

‘Sorry, chère,’ her voice says somewhere in the room behind him. Rémy pushes himself upright on the couch, moving slowly against the dizziness. ‘About as subtle as a sledgehammer, I know, but it was the quickest way to make sure you were on the side of the angels.’

He looks into the dark, finds the hot red glare of eyes that burn like his. ‘Ah, _merde_ ,’ he says under his breath, getting to his feet in a hurry. _Rémy, y’ couillon_.

‘Which is funny,’ she continues in a honeyed drawl that matches his cadence-for-cadence, an effect creepy enough to prickle at his spine and shoulderblades. ‘Talking to the man they call le Diable. Isn’t that right, Rémy?’

‘How do you—’

A brilliant light illuminates her face and her bare fingers as she holds a card up from the deck that he knows was tucked away in a deep pocket of his coat. She lets it flare bright into the night, face curious.

‘Careful,’ he says. It’s dark enough, and her eyes are dazzled enough, that he counts it safe to go into his back pocket for the spare deck he keeps on him always. But that’s gone, too. ‘I’d hate to see that go up in your pretty face, there, darling.’

She looks at the crackling card, a cross etched between her brows, then sighs and lets it sizzle itself out without exploding, leaving them both in darkness for a beat before she reaches over and tugs at the cord of a lamp to bathe the room in a warm yellow glow. ‘Thought I’d let you ease yourself awake.’

‘A nice gesture,’ Rémy says drily, ‘but since I’m not quite sure what you did to my head, I think I’ll hold back my thanks.’

He looks around: they are in a small cramped office, file cabinets left open and overflowing, a fan spinning lazily overhead, a name he can’t read etched on the door. She’s sitting perched atop a desk piled high with papers, kicking her feet; her trim jacket has been traded for a battered bomber coat, brown leather worn butter-smooth with age. Rémy glances at the couch squeezed up against the back wall, at his coat tossed over the spindly iron hat rack. His face twists quizzically. ‘How the hell’d you get me up here?’

She blinks, and he notices that her eyes have faded back to their pleasant hazel green as she grins. ‘You didn’t think you were the only one with special talents of your own, did you?’ She flutters her lashes at him teasingly and adds, her voice her own again and flatly amused, ‘I’m not some wilting magnolia, sugar.’

‘Never took you for one,’ he says. ‘Though I’d like to know how you managed that little trick of yours.’ His eyes go to the deck of cards resting in her lap as she tugs her gloves back on.

‘My special talent,’ she says wryly, flexing her hands. He remembers the latent coiled power he’d seen in her back in the club and says, ‘Ah.’

She slides off the desk and moves around it to drop into a chair, shuffling through the papers and folders on her desk till comes up with one that is particularly and ominously fat. ‘Sorry about the alley, but it was the quickest way to get you here without kicking up a fuss. We have a mutual interest, you see. The man you’re here to hunt down.’ She looks up. ‘The one with eyes like yours.’

He meets her gaze and does his best not to look away. He guesses that she saw, wheedled it out of his head like she did his name and powers; there is no point in lying about it. ‘Essex,’ he says. He steels himself. ‘Sinister.’

‘That’s the one.’ She pushes up the sleeves of her jacket and braces her hands on the desk, face serious, white falling over her eye again. ‘That’s why you left New Orleans. You want to know what he is to you.’

‘Careful, girl,’ Rémy says. His hands itch in their emptiness; he longs to have his cards in his hands, a cigarette, his bo.

Her mouth quirks. ‘Don’t worry—I’m talking big, but I didn’t get anything more than that out of you. Feels too much like cheating.’ She holds up the folder. ‘I’m willing to share if you are. You’ve got an interesting skill set; I think I could make good use of you in this town.’

Rémy props himself against a tipping filing cabinet, making it look as lazy as possible; his head is still pounding from whatever she did to him, his feet unsteady. ‘People have been making good use of me for a bit too long, chère,’ he says. ‘S’why I left New Orleans in the first place. Why I’m on this little goose chase in the first place. You’ll have to do better than that.’

She thinks over her words carefully. ‘Associates,’ she says, leaning forward on her elbows. ‘Partners. Sound like something you could stomach?’

‘Why don’t we start with names,’ Rémy says, folding his arms. He smiles. ‘Seeing’s how you stole mine. _Partner_.’

She smiles back at him, tugging the collar of her jacket so it stands upright. ‘You can call me Anna Marie,’ she says, leaning back in her chair and putting her booted heels up on the desk. ‘Welcome to X-Factor Investigations, then, M’sieur LeBeau.’

‘Only if I get my name on the door,’ Rémy says. ‘And, chère? There would’ve been an even quicker way to get me up here. You only had to ask.’

‘My kiss has a bit of a kick to it,’ Anna Marie says, her eyes sparking wicked and bright. ‘But I’ll add a note to your file.’


End file.
